“You think so?”
Warren didn’t but he said, “Might.”
“You, you have got to find us an island. Now.”
“I still think we’re safe here.”
“Incredible! You are no kind of sailor at all and you are afraid to admit it. Afraid to say you don’t know how to find land.”
“Bullshit. I—” But she interrupted him with a flood of words he couldn’t keep up with. He heard her out, nodding finally, not knowing himself why he wanted to stay on the raft, on the sea. It just felt better, was all, and he did not know how to tell her that.
When the argument was finally over he went back to thinking about the second message. Some of it was German and he knew a little of that, but not those particular words. He had never learned any Japanese even though he had lived in Tokyo.
The next morning at dawn he woke suddenly and knew there was something near the raft. The swell was smooth and orange as the sun caught it. On the glassy horizon he saw nothing. He was very hungry and he remembered the Swarmer from yesterday. He had used the meat from the first kills to bait their lines but nothing bit. He wondered if that was because the fish would not take Swarmer meat or if there were no fish down there to have. The aliens had been changing the food chain in the oceans, he had read about that.
Then he saw the gray dot floating far away. The raft was drifting toward it and in a few minutes he snagged it. The message said
CONSQUE KPOF AMN SOLID. DIAOLEN MACHEN SMALL YOUTH SCHLECT UNS. DERINGER CHANGE DA. UNS B WSW. SAGEN ARBEIT BEI MOUTH. SHIMA CIRCLE STEIN NONGO NONGO UMI DRASVITCH YOU.
He peered at the words … and squatted on the deck and felt the long dragging minutes go by. If he could—
“Warren! Wa—Warren!” Rosa called. He followed her gesture.
A blur on the horizon. It dipped and rose among the ragged waves. Warren breathed deeply. “Land.”
Rosa’s eyes swelled and she barked out a sharp cackling laughter. Her lips went white with the laughing and she cried, “Yeah! Yeah! Land!” and shook her fists in the air.
Warren blinked and measured with his eyes the current and the angle the brown smudge ahead made with their course. They would not reach it by drifting.
He worked quickly.
He took the tree limb and knocked away the supports of the lean-to. In the center of the raft he knelt and measured out the distances with hands and fingers and worked a hole in between two planks. He could wedge the limb into it. He made a collar out of strips of bark. The limb was crooked but it made a vertical beam.
He took the plywood sheet of the lean-to and lashed it to the limb. With the knife he dug stays in the plywood. The wire that held the logs in place in the deck would have been good to use but he could not risk unlashing them. He used the last of their twine instead, passing it through the stays in the plywood and making them into trailing lines. The plywood was standing up now like a sail catching the wind, and by pulling the twine he could tack. The raft took the waves badly but by turning the plywood sheet he could take the strain off the weak places where the logs and boards met.
The wind backed into the east in late morning. They could not make much headway and the land was still a dark strip on the horizon. Warren broke off a big piece of wood at the raft corner. He hacked at it with the knife. A Swarmer surfaced nearby and Rosa started her screeching. He hit her and watched the Swarmer, but he never stopped whittling at the wood in his lap. The Swarmer circled once and then turned and swam away to the south.
He finished with the wood. He made a housing for it with the rest of the bark strips. It sat badly at the end of the raft but the broad part dug into the water and by leaning against the top of it he could hold the angle. He got Rosa to hold two blocks of wood against the shaft for leverage and that way the thing worked something like a rudder. The raft turned to the south, toward the land.
Noon passed. Warren fought the wind and the rudder and tried to estimate the distance and the time left. If dark came before they reached the land the current would take them past it and they would never be able to beat back against the wind to find it again. He had been so long away from firm ground that he felt a need for it that was worse than his hunger. The pitch of the deck took the energy out of you day and night, you could not sleep for holding onto the deck when the sea got high, and you would do anything for something solid under you, for just—
Solid.
The message had said solid. Did that mean land?
Gefahrlich gross something something solid.
Gefahrlich had some kind of feel to it, something about bad or dangerous, he thought. Gross was big. Dangerous big blank blank land? Then some Japanese and other things and then scatter portline zero. Scatter. Make to go away?
Warren sweated and thought. Rosa brought him an old piece of Swarmer but he could not eat it. He thought about the words and saw there was some key to them, some beauty in them.
The rudder creaked against the wooden chocks. The land was a speck of brown now and he was pretty sure it was an island. The wind picked up. It was coming on to late afternoon.
Rosa moved around the raft when he did not need her, humming to herself, the Swarmers forgotten, eating from the pieces of meat still left. He did not try to stop her. She was eating out of turn but he needed all his thought now for the problem.
They were coming in on the northern shore. He would bring them in at a graze, to have a look before beaching. The current fought against them, but the plywood was enough to sweep them to the south.
South? What was there about …
WSW. West southwest?
UNS B WSW.
Uns was we in German, he was pretty sure of that. We be WSW? On the WSW part of the land? The island? Or WSW of the island? We—the Skimmers.
He noticed Rosa squatting in the bow of the raft, eager, her weight dipping the boards with the blue-green swell and bringing hissing foam over the planks. It slowed them but she did not seem to see that. He opened his mouth to yell at her and then closed it. If they went slow, he would have more time.
The Skimmers were all he had out here and they had tried to tell him …
Portline. Port was left. A line to the left?
They were coming in from the northeast as near as he could judge. Veering left would take them around and to the southwest. Or WSW.
The island seemed to grow fast now as the sun set behind it. Warren squinted against the glare on the waves. There was something between them and the island. At the top of a wave he strained to see and could make out a darker line against pale sand. White rolls of surf broke on it.
A reef. The island was going to be harder to reach. He would have to bring the raft in easy and search for a passage. Either that or smash up on it and swim the lagoon, if there was no way through the circle of coral around—
Circle stein nongo. He did not know what stein was, something to drink out of or something, but the rest might say don’t go in the circle.
